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The teleological modal profile and subjunctive background of organic generation and growth

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For one of the most natural of works for living things (as many as are complete and not damaged, or not spontaneously generating) is to make another like itself – an animal an animal, a plant a plant – so as to partake so far as it is able in the eternal and divine. … Since, then, it is unable to share in the eternal and divine by way of continuity, because perishable things do not admit of persisting as the same thing and one in number, … it persists not as the same thing but as one like itself, not one in number but one in form.

Aristotle, De Anima, Book II, Chapter 4

Abstract

Formal methods for representing the characteristic features of organic development and growth make it possible to map the large-scale teleological structure of organic activity. This provides a basis for semantically evaluating, or providing a theory of meaning for, talk of organic activity as purposive. For the processes of organic generation and growth are subjunctively robust under a variety of influences characteristic for the kind or species in question, and these subjunctive conditions can be displayed in a two-dimensional array. After motivating and introducing this array, I use its two dimensions to partially account for features of the purposiveness characterizing two sets of exemplars of the plant and animal kingdoms: ferns and cacti, and cheetah and gazelle. The result is a formal framework for interpreting talk of organic activity as purposive, able to be adapted to a range of research traditions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of biology.

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Notes

  1. It remains to be seen whether there is much overlap, but the modal logic of human agency has been a topic of some study in the last half-century, and the generality of the current analysis might be examined by looking to that literature. Belnap et al. (2001) and Elgesem (1997) gather together some of the formal tools available for studying agency, while the teleological character of institutions is discussed in Hindriks and Guala (2014) and (2021). In recent work, Fulda (2017 and 2020) makes a case for assimilating organic purposiveness to the purposiveness of agency (understood, in contrast with human agency, as non-intentional). Kant of course thought some such assimilation was a condition on the possibility of understanding organisms as the kinds of things they are, about which see Stovall (2015b).

  2. The focus here on a special class of spatio-temporal existents (organisms) lends itself to the branching-histories interpretation of Belnap et al. (2001). On this view, what must, might, and would be is a matter of the indeterminist nature of our single common world, and the powers bound up in the things inhabiting our world.

  3. See Schroeder-Heister, (2022) for an overview of proof-theoretic semantics. Under the banner of inferentialism, Brandom, (1994) and Peregrin, (2014) work out the view as a contribution to the philosophy of language. Francez (2015) formalizes proof-theoretic semantics for logically complex sentences, and details its application to philosophical logic and linguistics; Stovall, (2020) extends that framework by laying down rules for specifying an intended interpretation for atomic sentences.

  4. This is an idea Brandom develops in detail, with particular attention given to the role of different modalities in articulating the conceptual fine structure of our cognitive abilities (see in particular chapters 4 and 5 of Brandom, 2008).

  5. But see Linson and Calvo (2020) and Maher (2017) for defenses of the position that plants are minded (or cognitive), after a fashion, and Thompson (2007), particularly chapters 5 and 6, for an extended argument that the notion of cognition can be applied across the organic world.

  6. It might be instructive to examine the extent to which the account of teleological language developed here can be used to represent features of McShea’s analysis of goal-directed systems; the hope is that the two views fit together tolerably well, one directed at the phenomenon and the other at our talk and thought about it, but this is little more than a hope for now.

  7. See the opening pages of DiFrisco (2019) and of Morgan (2022) for surveys of the debate about criteria for biological individuality, and about the relationship between biological individuals and biological kinds. See Sect. 2 of Corti (2022) for an overview of the renewed importance placed on the organism as the unit of interest for biologists, as opposed to supra-organismal units like populations and sub-organismal units like genes.

  8. I will speak of kind terms generally, though my focus lies on count nouns or sortals. In cases where a kind term is a mass noun (“gold”, “water”), an implicit quantifying phrase like “amount of” will be supplied.

  9. This work developed in tandem with a first-order formalization of kind terms, on which they function as restrictions on quantification, thereby building the relationship between kinds and individuals into the variable-binding properties of quantification (e.g. in Bressan 1972 and Gupta 1980).

  10. Though it is not often drawn together with material-inferential theories of meaning, as the discussion in Sect. 2 indicated the point of view spelled out in this paragraph has been extensively defended by Wilfrid Sellars and, following him, Robert Brandom.

  11. The “cognitive” clause allows that we might also regard individuation as a practical capacity exhibited in one’s dispositions to respond to an object in principled ways, without in any meaningful sense conceiving of anything about the object’s dispositions.

  12. See Stovall (2015a), Chapter 4, and (2023a) for a more protracted exposition and defense of this suggestion.

  13. DiFrisco characterizes these explanations in terms of the ampliative inferences underwritten with the use of projectible properties; this bears comparison with the material-inferential account of meaning sketched here in Sect. 2.

  14. In the interest of simplicity, I focus on organic activities denoted by atomic sentences in the antecedents and consequents of the initial subjunctive. It would also seem important to consider OESS relations whose antecedents and consequents are logically complex, which would in turn permit considerations of relations between OESSs themselves – e.g., where there is an OESS relation between retaining rainwater and fueling cellular growth, and another OESS relation between photosynthesis and cellular growth, it would be possible to model relations of subjunctive stability between, on the one hand the conjunctive process of retaining rainwater and photosynthesis, and on the other cellular growth. I return to this point after introducing the notion of a slice of a subjunctive background below, but in the interest of not overloading either the formalism, or its graphical representation, these issues are set aside here.

  15. The discussion of upper-directed systems in McShea (2012), and of sea-urchin growth, offers another case study.

  16. Lee and McShea (2020) operationalize persistence and plasticity, and in future work I hope to compare that operationalization to the analysis given here.

  17. Unlike typical neurons in animal nervous systems, as I use the term here multiple axon connections branch out from a neuron, each from a different OESS in that neuron (see Fig. 6). A closer tie with the biological vocabulary could be enforced by speaking of telodendria, which are the branching ends of an axon that allow a neuron to communicate across a number of synapses, but I stick with the simpler terminology.

  18. This still treats each OESS as bearing only a single axon connection to a single successive neuron, although as noted in the discussion of Fig. 5, for some purposes this restriction may be relaxed.

  19. Because each OESS can be made the node of an array, with horizontal and vertical relations plotted from that node, it might be possible to represent a slice as a set-theoretic construction out of simple arrays.

  20. The language of “forms of life” is borrowed from Thompson (2008).

  21. My thanks to conversation with David Oderberg and Christopher J. Austin on this point.

  22. See the discussion in Sect. 3.7 of Yahia et al. (2019), and at pp. 58–60 of Nobel and Bobich (2009).

  23. This does not rule out the possibility that the trait has other purposes as well; Ju et al. (2012) detail the role that the spines of the cactus Opuntia microdasys play in water-collection from fog. And though widely accepted, there is some debate as to whether predator protection is the most evolutionarily significant purpose of cactus spines. Other candidate purposes include temperature regulation and the dissemination of shoots and fruit (see Gibson & Nobel, 1986, p. 108, and the sources cited in Crofts and Stankowich, 2021, p. 659).

  24. PEPC is also used in C4 carbon-fixation photosynthesis in plants like maise and sugarcane (see Kanai & Edwards, 1999).

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Stovall, P. The teleological modal profile and subjunctive background of organic generation and growth. Synthese 203, 77 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04438-2

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